


The fundamentals of politics

by edourado



Series: Hell's Kitchen Chronicles [49]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, High School AU, Oneshot, Tumblr Prompt, because it seems appropriate lately, kastle - Freeform, political differences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 09:50:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8619733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edourado/pseuds/edourado
Summary: Prompt: "ROTC obsessed senior Frank Castle and freshman school newspaper writer Karen Paige are notorious for their arguments about the government (he's pro military, pro large government, she's not, to the point of almost anti establishment, she's the social justice queen and doesn't trust the government a whit.)"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deathtosanepeople](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathtosanepeople/gifts).



> First high school AU, ever. Hope you like it

When they met, it actually started nice.

He was a gentleman, the first person to actually acknowledge her on her first day as a high schooler. First day and she was already so busy.

Karen Page breathed through her nose, closing her eyes to try and not snap at the stupid locker. She had too many things to carry, she had that interviews at the school paper, she already had a ton of homework. And her new locker refused to open.

“Oh, God, come on…” she breathed out, adjusting the backpack on her shoulder and adjusting the big notebook with clippings from her stories at the junior high paper on her arm.

Suddenly, there was someone by her side.

“Hey, you need help?”

Looking at her left, she saw this guy, probably a senior, standing there with his backpack on his shoulder, a pair of gloves hanging from his neck and a big duffle bag on his left hand.

“Oh, uh…” she started. He was… Strangely… Handsome?

“This one is trouble, you gotta…” he dropped his bag on the floor and pushed his elbow hard on the bottom left of the locker, making it snap and open. “It jams, see?”

“Oh, thanks!”

“No trouble.” He reached out his hand. “Frank Castle.”

Smiling, she shook it.

  
“Karen Page.”

“First day?” he asked while she loaded her backpack inside the locker and sorted her stuff out for her meeting with the paper’s editor.

He turned out to be a senior, like she thought. Stood there and talked to her until she was ready to go and then showed her the right way.

“Thanks a lot, Frank”, she smiled at him when they needed to part - he had practice. Boxing.

“Nah, it’s ok. Good luck on your, uh… Audition?”

“Interview”, she smiled. Why was she smiling so much? He wasn’t even that cute.

“Right. I’ll see ya.”

He walked away and she watched him go for a few seconds. Then she turned around and walked down the hallway that would take her to The Bulletin.

.:.

He opened her locker for her for about a month. She knew how to do it, by now, but every time he was passing by and she was standing there, he would tell his friends to wait, hand her whatever it was he was holding (usually his boxing gloves or his backpack), elbow the left spot on the locker door and smile.

“Thank you, Frank”, she would always say, giving him back his stuff.

“No problem, ma’am”, he would reply, walking away with a smile and a nod of his head.

.:.

When her stories started to be published, though, that changed.

One day, he showed up with a copy of the Bulletin in hand, leaning on the locker next to hers.

“So this is interesting”, he said, opening it with flare, folding it so her article sticked out.

“You like it?” she asked, pulling her books and putting them in her bag.

“‘What is it, to be a hero?’” he quoted, from her title. and then he jumped ahead to the ending of the article. “‘It makes us wonder, doesn’t it, when all of that is put in contrast with our representatives in office, who work very hard to undermine us, to rob us of our rights, to make us work our lives away for mediocre results. All the while, urging young men to join their forces, leave their families, devote their bodies and minds to go around the world killing, spreading destruction and horror, enforcing the culture of hate, of war, a culture that should have been left buried in the ugly, hateful past of our nation.That’s what it means to be a hero for the United States of America.’” He finished, lowering the paper, looking at her with a face that was very different from the nice smiles and winks he would throw her way everyday.

Karen tried not to smile. She was very, very proud of that one, and Trish, her editor, loved it. People have complimented her on it. The ones that haven’t were, mostly, from conservative families, so she was not too worried. She would be if they were complimenting her.

Judging by his tone, he wasn’t very happy with it, though. That was surprising, but it kinda made sense. A jock, who associated, mainly, with other white, privileged, able bodied heterosexual male jocks. It made sense, really.

“You really believe this?” he asked, lifting the paper to her.

“You don’t?”

That was the day they had argued for the first time. It hadn’t been ugly, they stopped before things could get out of hand, but it did tell her that Frank Castle wasn’t really that much different from all the athletes in town. Nice, polite, even a gentleman, but oh, so easily brainwashed.

.:.

Things escalated as she continued to write her anti-establishment articles and his great ambition of joining the ROTC became known to her.

They debated, they argued, they spent hours trying to convince each other of their point of view.

At first, they would have “truces”, for coffee or whatever, when they walked home together after class. Then, the truces stopped, as their separate group of friends - people who shared their political views - grew along with their differences.

He did not open her locker for her anymore.

.:.

“Hello, Frank”, she said, one afternoon, walking in the field where his team was practicing - because of course he also played football.

“Ma’am”, he said, straightening up, looking at her with his brow furrowed, sweating, his shirt missing, and she had to shake herself mentally and take her eyes off his chest. “How can I help you?”

“You wanna comment on the lack of names from the football team on the Greg Handerson petition?”

Greg Handerson was the athlete who had been transferred from Los Angeles and failed to make the football team, in spite of being obviously a better player than anyone of the students who tried out. Greg was openly gay. There was a petition for the coach to hold new tryouts, inviting two unbiased coaches from neighboring schools to decide if Greg deserved the position of quarterback or not.

Frank sighed, supporting his hands on his hips, looking down.

He really did look great like that. Not that it mattered, though. Not at all.

“I had a feeling you were gonna come pestering me about that.”

“I’m not pestering, I’m just curious. So far, virtually every member of every school team, club or association signed the petition. From the football team, curiously…” She made a show of checking her list. “Not one name. Why is that?”

“I can’t speak for other people.”

“But you can speak for yourself. Or does the team have your voice, too?”

He rolled his eyes, turning around to walk away.

“Go home, Page.”

“Hey, Castle, what’s the hold up?” one of his teammates screamed from the other side of the field. He lifted his hand in a “be right there” manner.

“Just tell me this. The decision to not sign it was individual or a group thing?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake-”

“Are you being coerced to not give your real opinion on the matter?”

“Hey, sweetheart!” yelled another player, this time to her. “Get off the field!”

“Look. That’s enough of your conspiratory bullshit”, Frank said, turning to her. “Nobody is being coerced to do anything.”

“Ok. So it’s the individual opinion of all the members that a gay player cannot be a part of the team?”

“See, you keep twisting my words”, he said, resuming his walk.

“I’m not twisting anything, Frank, it’s called fact check. Not one of your team members signed. It’s either a group decision, which means that you are forbidden to sign, or it’s an individual one, which means you all share the opinion that something about Greg makes it impossible for him to be on the team. And he’s a better player than all of you. Hmm. I wonder what that ‘something’ might be.”

She didn’t really think he was a homophobe, or a bigot of any sort. Even if he did have his sights on the army college program and was a government apologist, he was a nice guy. His heart was in the right place. Karen just wished his brain to be, too.  

He stopped again.

“You should think before you go throwing accusations like that.”

“Again, it’s just fact checking.”

“Fine, where is the goddamned thing? I’ll sign it.”

“Oh, I don’t have it. You can look for Bree Howard, she’s the one collecting signatures. I just want a quote.”

“Well, you can quote me on this: Fuck off”, he said, smiling sarcastically.

“Classy”, she said, walking away. He wasn’t really the one she wanted to talk to, anyway. Coach Barone was the one she came to see.

While she walked towards his office, she shook her head and took a deep breath, trying her best not to think about Frank Castle and his sweaty chest.

.:.

That chick was such a headache.

If Frank had known that she would turn out to be such a pain in the ass activist, he would have never helped her with her locker that second time.

Let that be a lesson: stop being nice to girls just because they look good.

He had helped her the first time because he knew that unit was a bitch, he knew how to open it and she seemed to be having trouble. The second time, though, it was because he kept thinking about those blue eyes of hers, and the way her hair would curl at the ends. Plus she had a nice smile. And she seemed nice, too, so he thought, maybe…

Well, that “maybe” had gone straight to hell.

He walked to the rest of the team and exercised in silence. Because, damn it all, as annoying and full of conspiracy theories as she was, she had a point right there.

“You think we should talk to coach about the Handerson thing again?” he asked Luke, once they were walking into the locker room.

His friend shrugged, but seemed to be thinking.

“He’s gonna be pissed. He said we weren’t supposed to sign it.”

“Yeah, but Page is out here making accusations, the only thing she didn’t do was call us all a bunch of homophobes, but I know that’s what she meant.”

“Yeah”, Luke agreed as they walked through the door. “I figured that would happen.”

“You guys still going on about that shit?” asked Phillip, walking past them. “Come on. You really wanna have a faggot on the team, checking our junk out?”

“And that is exactly why” said the coach, walking in. “I don’t want you talking to the paper people.” He looked at Phillip, shaking his head. “You can’t say shit like that, son. Come on.”

After the talk with Page, the coach told them to “sign the damn petition if you want to. Can’t have that girl writing whatever it is she wants to write about us.”

Frank had signed it. So had Luke and six other guys. Greg was voted into the team.

The next petition was to change the coach, since Barone was obviously and almost violently bullying Greg - who really was an excellent player, he had already lead them to victory twice - and the other members who signed the petition.

Ten players signed it.

And that particular signature had earned him a smile from Karen. He wasn’t planning on telling her, but she signed it the same day he did, and was interviewing people as they added their names to the list.

He smiled back, because fuck, she looked beautiful. A pain in the ass, she was, but she did look nice. Plus, all she wanted was to do some good.

Either way. He knew better than to entertain her politically correct hippie talk. He wishes the world could be as nice as she preached, but reality is very different. In reality, people are stupid, they need a system and leadership, otherwise the very thing Page defends with such passion - which, incidentally, were the same things he wanted to fight to protect - would just not exist anymore. He didn’t understand why that couldn’t get through her head.

And he wished she did. Because then maybe they could understand each other and they could go back to going out for coffee after class again or he could entertain the idea of taking her out. He would like that. A lot.

But, for that to work, they would have to stop arguing about the fundamentals of politics every time a new topic came up. And they both seemed incapable of doing that.

.:.

Things escalated rather quickly when the army officials showed up to recruit students.

For two weeks, the paper had printed long and angry articles pointing out everything that was wrong about the government collecting students to serve and fight their wars.

And, when she heard he had been accepted, with honors, to the ROTC program, she couldn’t keep her words to the paper anymore.

“I assume you’re happy, signing your life away to fight for a corrupt government”, she jabbed, throwing her things inside her car while he walked to his motorcycle - which he had parked right by her vehicle, not on purpose.

“Is this your way of congratulating me?” he smiled at her, just to see her face contort in that angry scowl that looked so good on her.

“Why would I do that?”

They proceeded to argue for over fifteen minutes about weather it was good or bad that the army was paying for his college education, their voices getting louder every five minutes or so.

He was getting tired of fighting her, and she was doing her best not to angry cry. Both were making an excellent job of keeping those facts from each other.

The other students on the parking lot were trying to ignore them. It’s just Frank Castle and Karen Page arguing again, nothing new. But this one was longer and louder, so there were sighs and groans and eyes rolling all around.

“What do you even care what I do, anyway? You won’t have to see me next year, you should be happy I’m going”, he said.

“You think I like knowing that they’re gonna fly you off to God knows where to be shot at? I don’t want that, Frank!”

“Hah. Ok. Don’t tell me you’re worried about me, now.”

“I-” she started, but stopped herself and something lit up inside him. He took a step towards her.

“You what?”

She let out an angry breath, moving her hair off her face, looking in his eyes for one second before looking away.

“Just because we disagree on most things, doesn’t mean I-” she stopped herself again, shaking her head.

“Doesn’t mean what, Page?” another step and he could smell her perfume.

Not that it mattered.

WIth a sigh, she looked up at him, that angry frown in place and, next thing he knew, his hand reached out on it’s own, grabbed her by her neck and pulled her mouth against his at the same time he took another step further, trapping her between him and her car.

Around them, it took the population of the parking lot the whole of three seconds to realize what was going on. They had all been ignoring them, trying not to look their way (they tended to be encouraged when they had an audience). When the shouts stopped abruptly, they looked again towards them, just to suppress a collective gasp.

They were making out.

“Are you seeing this?”

“It’s not them.”

“What’s going on?”

“Is that Frank and Karen?!”

“Oh my God.”

“Guys, it’s not them.”

“What’s the hell is happening?!”

“Are we all dead?”

“Is this a prank?”

“Oh, they’re hot.”

“I knew it! Pay up.”

“Jess, you’re not gonna believe this. Get your ass to the parking lot right now!”

They heard none of that, though. Frank was trying not to go insane with the feeling of her hands on him, or the fact that he had her pressed against his chest. Supporting a hand on the car behind her, he tried to get some leverage, to maybe retreat from her an inch or two, but her hand sneaked from inside his hair, down his neck, to close around the collar of his shirt and pull him back and he went willingly.

Karen was pretty much lost in sensation. So that’s how that chest felt against her own, huh? She had wondered. A lot.

His hand was heavy, pressing hard on her hip, fingers squeezing and opening to run his palm around to her back, bringing her hip closer to his and she wanted to lift her leg, hook it around his.

His mouth was demanding on hers. She kissed him back with the same intensity. Both shivered over the feeling of those kisses, long overdue, improbable as anything.

At the same time, it seemed, they remembered where they were, who they were, and stopped moving.

Almost struggling for breath, her hands froze on his face and his pressed on the car and her waist. She lifted her face to the sky, he hung his head down towards the floor.

When they looked around to see if anyone was watching them, everybody looked like they were going on about their lives (they were, in fact, freaking out along with them, trying to look like they weren’t watching, to maybe trick them into start sucking face again).  

Frank looked at Karen, whose blue eyes bore into his.

“I think maybe we should.. Talk. Somewhere else.”

Hiding her lips, she nodded, still taking note that his chest was very firm, as was his abdomen.

“Not now, though”, she said, her voice smaller than she wished.

“No, I have to go, now.”

“Me too.”

Slowly, he stepped away from her, running a hand on his face and she adjusted her skirt, breathing in and out slowly, trying to put her heartbeat under control.

“Page”, he started.

“I know, I know. ‘Fuck off’”, she said, trying to bring them back to familiar territory, but he clicked his tongue, watching her mouth as she smiled.

“Stop.”

Standing up straight, she leaned off her car (her brother’s old one), looking around, spotting Trish looking at them from inside her own (fancier) car, eyes huge, mouth hanging open.

“I’ll swing by later”, he said, taking a step back.

“Swing- Where?”

He smiled, awkward, sexy, fuck, he looks so good.

“I don’t know. Where you gonna be?”

“When?”

He stared at her and boy. Ooh, boy.

“Coffee?”

He took another step back, towards his motorcycle and she nodded.

“Ok”, she agreed, not even thinking about another answer.

“Ok. I’ll pick you up.”  
  


“From where?” she smiled again and he let out a small smile, turning around to walk to his motorcycle.

“Wherever.”

She chuckled and suddenly there he was again, kissing her so deep she thought she was gonna pass out.

After a few seconds, though, she bit his lip playfully before pushing him away from her.

“Fuck off, Frank”, she said, smiling, and he laughed, pressed one more kiss to her mouth and then walked away with purpose and she blinked and swallowed, standing there as he stared at her through his helmet, turning his bike on, making that noise she hated.

Karen was on her way home and Frank was on his. Both had the same line of thought.

“Holy shit.”


End file.
